


Save file to folder

by iridescentglow



Category: Vlogger RPF
Genre: M/M, charlieissocoollike, nerimon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-01-26
Updated: 2011-01-26
Packaged: 2017-10-15 02:25:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,261
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/156064
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iridescentglow/pseuds/iridescentglow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are videos that Charlie doesn't want the world to see. (Less pretentious summary: Alex breaks up with his girlfriend and Charlie doesn't want to pretend to be sorry.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Save file to folder

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to **proofpudding** for prodding me into writing a better second draft.

Charlie saves unedited video snippets on his computer. They’re sort of like outtakes, except that they’re not funny or silly. Most of them aren’t even interesting. They’re just things he has filmed that he can’t bring himself to delete.

Some of them feature Alex. Okay, a lot of them feature Alex. But some of them just capture the way the sky looks on a particular day – mundane stuff like that.

He hides them in a folder called ‘Year 7 Field Trip to Glastonbury Tor’, which he knows for a fact is a subject too boring to be of interest to anyone.

(Ironically, he keeps his porn for anyone to find, in a folder labelled ‘Charlie’s Pornographic Materials’, because he thinks people make way too much of a fuss about consenting Asian lesbians sharing some harmless dildo fun.)

He could probably go the whole hog and encrypt the folder, but that would seem like overkill. The video snippets are like extensions of his memory. They’re not important enough to encrypt; they’re just private… they’re just _his_.

*

For **flatwarming.mov** , Charlie kept his camera running just to give himself something to do with his hands. With the party in full swing, the quality of the video ended up overwhelmed by dim lighting and loud music, the air visibly fuzzy with smoke from a joint being passed around. Charlie filmed something like an hour’s footage, but he has retained just 20 seconds.

The video in question pans jerkily as someone nudges Charlie’s arm by accident, moving the camera. After another blurry interlude, the shot comes to rest on Alex. It catches him just at the moment a slow smile is breaking across his face. The punch line of the joke he’s laughing at is lost to the noise of the room, but the smile is captured intact.

*

In **amsterdam1.mov** , Alex is barely lit and he’s whispering.

“Good evening, Charlie’s camera,” Alex says, staring down the lens. “Or should I say, good morning, because it is now”—he cranes his neck to check the clock—“three-thirty a.m. and I am _bored_.

“My comrade here has been asleep for three hours. You may recognise him…” At this point, Alex flips the camera around. The video shows Charlie, asleep, with his mouth slightly open, in the hotel room’s other bed, a foot away.

“Traitorous Charlie, as I shall now be calling him, went to sleep and left me with nothing to do in a foreign country,” Alex continues, bringing the camera back to his own face. “Let the record state that even though Charlie is temptingly unconscious and I am in possession of not one but _two_ Sharpies”—Alex holds up the marker pens—“I refrained from drawing a moustache on him.

“You can thank me when you’re awake, Traitorous Charlie.”

*

In **amsterdam2.mov** , which Charlie actually filmed himself, Alex stands a short distance away on a subway platform. He’s having an energetic argument with a Dutchman that he has just met. It’s either about the true feasibility of the European currency or it’s about Star Wars – simultaneously, it seems to be about both.

The Dutchman obviously knows about as much English as Alex knows Dutch. Alex, on the plane ride over, learned such useful Dutch phrases as ‘which way to the sex club?’ and ‘how much is a bouquet of tulips?’, but he’s nonetheless persevering with the conversation admirably, resorting to lots of gesticulation.

Eventually, Alex wanders back over to Charlie and says, “Made a new friend.”

“Lucky chap,” Charlie says ironically, because the Dutchman is now glowering in their direction.

He means it, though. What could be better than gaining Alex as a friend?

*

In **troubledwater.mov** , the camera shows Alex sitting cross-legged on Charlie’s bed, strumming his guitar. Charlie is foregrounded in the shot, his face turned away.

“Requests?” asks Alex.

“Simon and Garfunkel,” says Charlie, thinking of his earliest memory: crawling across the carpet at his grandparents’ house and swatting confusedly at the strange box that kept making sounds. The grownups in the room laughed as Granddad’s tape deck carried on playing _Bridge Over Troubled Water_.

“Simon and Garfunkel suck,” Alex says derisively.

However, he doesn’t pause before launching into a spirited rendition of ‘Scarborough Fair’. He obviously can’t remember the words, so it’s mostly just a lot of mumbling, until he starts extravagantly making up his own lyrics.

Halfway through the song, the phone rings. Charlie disappears off screen and takes the call in the other room – it’s his mum, with the news about his Granddad that he’s been dreading – and when he returns, ashen-faced, Alex just keeps on playing.

Alex plays every Simon and Garfunkel song he knows or half-knows. The lyrics to ‘The Sound of Silence’ and ‘The Boxer’ don’t fare much better when put through the nerimon filter, but it gives Charlie the distraction he needs.

*

At the centre of the shot in **tower.mov** is a rain-fogged train window that reveals a gradually darkening day. They’ve been on the train for something like 10,000 hours. They’ve eaten all their food, and now Alex is trying to build a metre-tall tower using just the empty packaging, plus assorted of their belongings. To be clear: he’s been trying for a while and it keeps falling down. Charlie has propped the camera up against his bag and laid his head down on the table between their seats.

As a result, the camera only shows the window, the tower, Alex’s hands and a slice of Charlie’s face.

“How did it go?” Alex asks, the shot capturing him as he places a sandwich box on top of a foundation formed of Coke cans. “On Wednesday?”

“Wednesday what?” Charlie mumbles, without lifting his head.

“Wednesday with the hot redhead!” Alex says.

“Ohh… the film sucked.”

“That’s it? That’s all?”

Charlie sighs, and then he says, “She made a joke about Doctor Who. It wasn’t funny, but I pretended to laugh anyway. But then I felt rubbish, because she must have thought it was a great joke and she kept, like, going back to it. Same bad joke. Over and over.”

“Like the moebius,” Alex says with a laugh, adding a Smarties packet to his tower. “Well, at least she watches Doctor Who.”

“I don’t want to have to laugh at jokes when they’re not funny,” Charlie says testily.

“Come on, mate, that’s a first date for you. It’s all part of the game. You have to get past the bullshit to get to the real stuff.”

There’s a long moment of quiet and the tower grows taller. Then Charlie says plaintively:

“I want… what I want… is to be part of one those crazy old artist couples you see in weird documentaries… who, like, feed each other’s creativity. Come up with an idea for an opera over breakfast. Write novels back and forth. Find a cancer cure in between episodes of Buffy.”

There’s another lapse into silence.

“Sorry, Charlieburg,” Alex says at last, sounding a little exasperated, “your expectations are all out of proportion. You don’t need a girl to feed your creativity. That’s what your friends are for.”

“Sounds backwards to me,” Charlie says, so quietly that the camera’s mic almost doesn’t pick it up.

Alex visibly doesn’t hear. It’s at that moment he shouts, “Ta-da!” because he’s done it, the tower is finished.

*

In **dinner.mov** , Charlie and Alex are playing Scrabble using Alphabetti Spaghetti. It’s the perfect pastime, because it combines food with an intellectual pursuit – in theory, anyway. Charlie doles out two bowls, containing a spoonful each of letters, and hands one to Alex. The Scrabble board, set up between them on their kitchen table, is a piece of toast.

It doesn’t quite follow the traditional rules of Scrabble, and Alex usually tries to play words like traneous (“if I’m not extraneous, I must be traneous!”) and gruntled (“if I’m not disgruntled, I surely must be gruntled!”), which typically leads Charlie to invoke the Ifyouregonnabe Rule and eat the board (“if you’re gonna be an smartarse, I’m eating this”). However, this video captures Alex sorting through his letters intently, with nary a smart-alec(x) comment.

After Charlie fishes out the letters ‘a’, ‘l’ and ‘e’ and carefully arranges them on the toast to form ‘ale’, Alex says:

“Hold up, hold up, I’m about to blow your mind, here.”

He slides an ‘x’ down his fork.

“Not done, not done!” he says, when Charlie moves to take his turn.

Alex then arranges the letters ‘c’, ‘h’, ‘a’, ‘r’, ‘i’ and ‘e’ on the board.

The result is an ‘alex’ that intersects with a ‘charlie’ at the ‘l’. It openly flouts a number of rules, but—

“I win,” says Alex happily, and Charlie can’t really deny it.

*

The most recent file, a video taken last night, is also the longest.

After a day of procrastination, **vacuuming.mov** captures him staring blankly into the camera at two a.m., trying to think of something to say. When he hears the sound of the vacuum, he looks around in alarm. The only explanation for the sound is that an alien abduction must be taking place in his living room.

Charlie and Alex do not vacuum. It’s noisy, it’s strenuous and even once you’ve done it, you’ll have to do it _again_ next week. Why even bother in the first place? In fact, Charlie has grown downright fond of the layer of fuzz that covers the floors of their flat. It’s like an extra carpet on top of the real carpet. Charlie suspects that one day it might grow so thick that they’ll be able to lie down in it, maybe hibernate for a few months. It’s quite an appealing prospect, if you don’t think too much about its consistency of dead skin and insect carcasses.

The camera’s still running when Alex nudges open Charlie’s bedroom door. The vacuum _mrooooooooom_ s monotonously and Alex says, “I’ve done the rest of the flat. Want me to do your room?”

“It’s two a.m.,” Charlie points out. “On a _Thursday_.” For reasons he can’t quite explain, this makes it weirder.

Alex pushes the door open wider. Brandishing the smiley-faced Henry the Hoover like a weapon, he looks like a mad cleaning woman with a vendetta against dust.

“Want me to?” he asks again.

“No, I’m fine,” says Charlie.

Alex finally shuts off the vacuum and slumps against the doorframe. “Thought it might make me feel better,” he mumbles.

“Vacuuming? You thought _vacuuming_ might make you feel better?”

“I thought about getting a jackhammer and just, I don’t know, driving it through my foot. Couldn’t think where to get one, though. A jackhammer. That’s a weird word. _Jackhammer_.”

Alex slinks into the room and collapses diagonally across Charlie’s bed.

“I close my eyes and I can just _hear_ her, like she’s right next to me,” Alex says, his voice muffled by the duvet he’s buried his face in. “I thought noise might help block it out.”

Oh.

So this is about The Girl.

Charlie probably should have guessed that, when Alex mentioned they broke up earlier today, shrugging laconically and giving a wry smile, he was merely putting on a brave face.

“I liked her, I really did,” says duvet-muffled Alex. “I thought I was falling in love with her.”

Alex gives away big lumps of his heart to every cute-sexy-funny girl he meets. It’s a pattern, and guess what? Not every girl is going to reciprocate.

Charlie does not say: _You fall in love every day. You could fall in love with a house plant._

Charlie does say: “I’m really sorry, mate.”

It’s the same thing he said earlier in the day. Except then he followed it up with: _Do you want to watch the new episode of_ Only Connect _?_

Now he says: “Do you want to talk about it?”

“No, I don’t want to fucking talk about it,” Alex mumbles and sinks deeper into Charlie’s bed, curling his body around the duvet.

There’s a long pause. Then Charlie says:

“Do you want to stop molesting my duvet?”

“No. Your duvet is my new favourite thing in the world. In fact, your duvet is my new girlfriend.”

“Are you drunk?”

“I’m drunk on _sadness_.” As he delivers this statement, Alex pops his head up like a meerkat and adds, “Drunk On Sadness is going to be the name of my new emo band. It’ll be me on vocals, and bass guitar will be played by the bloody, trampled remains of my heart.” Alex smiles briefly at his own joke and then sinks back into the arms of his new girlfriend, the duvet.

Charlie chews on his bottom lip and then ventures, “So there’s nothing I can do?”

“No.” _Pause._ “Well. I still want that jackhammer.”

Charlie turns back to his computer and Googles: _Where do I find a jackhammer at 2 a.m. on a Thursday?_

The results are unhelpful.

He tries again, because despite its status as an all-encompassing conglomerate, he still has utmost faith in Google.

He Googles: _How can I make Alex Day feel better?_

Nothing useful.

Finally, Charlie stands up and walks over to his bed, where Alex is still sprawled. He sits down and pats Alex awkwardly on the shoulder.

“Sorry, mate,” he says again.

Alex jerks his head, in what seems to be a nod-like gesture. Charlie wonders if maybe they should hug, but since Alex is still facedown, it seems like a difficult manoeuvre to initiate. He settles instead for moving his hand to Alex’s back and gently rubbing the space between his shoulder blades, which is what he’s seen people do with babies that are upset.

Unfortunately, it has the opposite effect entirely. Instead of being soothed and maybe falling asleep (like a baby), Alex actually _starts crying_.

Muffled by the duvet, it’s not a baby-type cry but a series of wet-sounding wheezes which ceases almost as soon as it starts. Alex rolls over onto his back and wipes the tears away using the heels of both hands. _Shit_ , he mouths, but the sound that makes it out of his mouth is more like a hiccup.

Alex takes a few deep breaths and then says, “You know how you always think that Forever Alone guy is really funny when you have a girlfriend? Like, haw haw haw, all those poor losers in the world. I’ll never be like them, because I have Laura or Beth or Karen or… or… Amethyst.”

Charlie has actually never found Forever Alone all that funny, precisely because he is so perpetually single. He can count his former girlfriends on the fingers of one hand, and he’s inclined to retrospectively downgrade at least two of those relationships to friendships with girls who occasionally let him touch their boobs.

Regardless, it’s worth pointing out that:

“You’ve never gone out with anyone named Amethyst. You’ve also never gone out with Karen Gillan, because I know that’s the Karen you were thinking of.”

Alex gives a sour smile, but he continues, “I was walking around earlier and I kept thinking that, if I looked in the mirror, I’d see that crazy guy looking back at me.”

He props himself up on his elbows and gives Charlie a searching look. This time, Charlie isn’t thinking about babies or hug etiquette. His heart hurts from how sad Alex looks and all he can think to do is wrap his arms around him.

Alex is floppy as a rag doll, like he could fall back into a slump at any moment. His head lolls against Charlie’s shoulder and Charlie feels the warmth of his breath against his neck.

“You’ve got me,” Charlie says quietly. “I know it’s not the same. But.”

“Charlie…” Alex murmurs.

It’s not the bright, quasi-ironical “Charlie!” with which Alex typically greets him over breakfast. It’s not the disgruntled “Charlie…” that comes when Charlie has eaten all the biscuits. It’s not a sing-song “Charlie” or a wheedling “Charlie” or a distracted “Charlie…?” It’s not even a _you’re my best friend and I love you, mate_ “Charlie”.

It’s a croaky, loaded “Charlie” that sends a thrill down his spine.

The camera, perched on Charlie’s desk, still passively filming after Charlie forgot to switch it off, catches the two figures on the bed cropped half out of frame. It’s Henry the Hoover who dominates the shot, looking up at Charlie and Alex curiously.

The moment that comes next felt endless as Charlie lived through it, but digitally rendered, it’s a mere half-second pause.

When Alex kisses him – a sloppy, haphazard movement that crushes their mouths together – his face is lost to shadow. Alex disappears from frame completely moments later, when he sags back against the duvet and pulls Charlie down on top of him. The ungainly tangle of their legs is the only part of them that is left in shot.

The camera doesn’t capture the firm clamp of Alex’s hand against Charlie’s cheek as they kiss and kiss and kiss. It doesn’t capture Alex’s smell – expensive moisturiser and cheap shampoo and dried sweat – the same smell that wafts out of his bedroom every day, but which now seems intensified into something new and intoxicating. The camera doesn’t capture the feeling that Charlie’s heart will beat right out of his chest.

The secret files that Charlie saves are like extensions of his memory, except they’re crisp and tangible.

The video clips are better and also worse than real memories, because it’s impossible to misremember their contents. Time can’t soften the edges of the image; he can’t pretend to hear a different tone to Alex’s voice.

Each and every time, without fail, **vacuuming.mov** will capture the instant in which Alex freezes and suddenly pushes Charlie away.

“Jesus fucking Christ, I’m sorry, Charlie,” Alex-on-screen says, his voice harsh and low. “I’m all fucked up. I don’t even know what’s going on with me. I just. I miss her. And you – you were there and – I’m all fucked up. I’m sorry.”

“Forget it,” Charlie hears himself say. He sounds shell-shocked and unconvincing, but Alex nods, taking the easy get-out.

“I should get some sleep,” Alex mumbles, scrambling off the bed.

Charlie and Henry the Hoover watch him leave.

*

After saving **vacuuming.mov** to the ‘Year 7 Field Trip to Glastonbury Tor’, Charlie clicks through the files within the folder at random. Suddenly their meaning seems different to him. He opens up **sky.mov** , which shows, quite literally, the sky. Except, now he’s forced to remember that he filmed the rosy hues that appeared on that particular afternoon with Alex standing next him, telling jokes and remarking on cloud patterns.

The folder is Alex. It’s all Alex.

He’d been ambushed when Alex kissed him last night, and relieved when he’d stopped. Hadn’t he? Wasn’t that what had happened?

He watches **vacuuming.mov** three more times, but it now seems frustratingly incomplete: it only shows action, not thought. He doesn’t know what Alex was thinking, and he can’t process what _he_ was thinking.

Abruptly, he moves the whole ‘Glastonbury Tor’ folder into the Trash and stares at the new hole in ‘Documents’.

He finger twitches. He can’t bear it. He clicks ‘Undo’ and the folder reappears where it belongs.

He squeezes his eyes shut for a moment, feeling panicked in a way that he can’t quite articulate. He reaches out and slaps shut his laptop.

He needs a walk. And an Egg McMuffin. And a brain transplant.

*

Charlie is gone for most of the day. He walks for such a long time that it’s almost dark by the time he’s looped around and made it back. He forgot his phone at home, so he’s had no texts, no emails, no tweets, no nothing for hours. The silence has been absolute. Unlocking his front door, he feels like a sailor who’s returned home from sea.

Charlie has been wondering how to greet Alex the next time he sees him – will it be awkward? will they just pretend nothing happened? – but he needn’t have worried, because the words make it out of his mouth automatically.

“What are you doing with that?” he blurts out, because Alex is sitting in the living room with his, Charlie’s, laptop balanced on his knees.

Alex is quiet for a moment, his eyes kept low, which manages to confirm every one of Charlie’s suspicions. He feels his stomach jolt, as if he has unknowingly stepped out onto a narrow window ledge 20 storeys from the ground.

“My laptop was making that weird growling noise again,” Alex says, without meeting his eye, “and Ed had just sent me a link to some video, saying I needed to watch it immediately, exclamation point. And I left my iPad at… well, I left it. So I grabbed your computer for a minute. And you left some folder open—”

Charlie’s mind screams: DID YOU REALLY LEAVE THE FOLDER OPEN, CHARLIE? OH MY GOD, WHAT KIND OF A STUPID TWAT ARE YOU?

“—and it was filled with videos, so I figured it was just stuff you were working on. I didn’t think you’d mind if I took a peek.” Alex exhales hard. “Except, it’s all… you and me.”

Finally, Alex looks up.

“Why have you saved a file of us kissing, Charlie?” he asks in a low voice.

“It’s not what you think,” Charlie says hurriedly. “I just left the camera running last night. By accident.”

There’s a moment of silence and then Charlie adds, resentfully:

“I didn’t ask you to come in and start kissing me. I didn’t ask you to mess with my head like that.”

Alex’s cheeks flush with pink, like he’s just been slapped. This time, the silence is excruciating and it seems to last an age. Charlie can’t break it, though; his brain seems suddenly empty of words. Finally, Alex says:

“You know what my mum said to me the other day? This followed on from, like, a half-hour solo from the songbook of Isn’t Charlie Amazing? She said”—Alex adopts a slight _blah-blah-blah_ tone of mocking—“you know sometimes you’re a bit hard to be around, Alex – not the easiest person to live with – but you mind that you don’t upset Charlie, because if you ever lost him, you’d regret it, you’d really regret it…” Alex trails off, the mocking fading from his voice.

He continues, “I spent all last night thinking I really fucked things up, and then you were gone when I got out of bed this morning, and I had all these mad, crazy thoughts that you’d packed your bags and left. And then I find this—this video of us. My stupidity in glorious technicolour, like some kind of This Is Your Life of Alex Day being a dick.”

Alex exhales hard and Charlie can see him trying to compose himself.

“Sorry,” he mutters. “Verbal diarrhoea. You know me. What I’m trying to say is… can we be mates again? Forget last night happened?”

When Charlie realises he hasn’t exactly breathed a lot over the last 30 seconds, he sucks in a big, shaky breath. It would be so easy to say yes; press reset on the last 24 hours. It takes a gargantuan effort for him to, instead, shake his head.

“No,” he says.

Alex looks shocked, but Charlie forges onward:

“I don’t want to be mates again. I don’t want to pretend to be sorry when you break up with your girlfriend. And I don’t want to go out with girls who are boring, who tell lame jokes, who make me feel maybe one-thousandth of what I feel when I’m with you.”

Charlie thinks the confession should make him feel cleansed in some way – a choir of angels and a weight lifted from his shoulders. In fact, he feels sick; like he’s just taken a dive off the ledge and now he’s in freefall, concrete rushing to meet him.

The feeling gets even worse when Alex turns and, wordlessly, walks out of the living room.

Strangely, however, it’s Charlie’s room he walks into, and when he appears moments later, he’s holding Charlie’s camera. Alex walks back to stand next to Charlie. He uses one hand to hold up the camera, mySpace-style, so that the shot captures both of them. The other hand he uses to grip Charlie’s shoulder. Both his hands seem to be shaking slightly.

Alex clears his throat and looks into the camera lens. He says:

“I guess Charlie likes to get everything down on video… and I guess I’m the same way… so here goes… this, right here, captured in a million tiny pixels, is what I want to say to you, Charlie.

“I don’t know what I’m doing half the time. No, maybe up that to seventy percent of the time. _No idea_. But the time that I feel most like myself is when I’m with you. And I don’t know if we’re destined to be one of those crazy old couples you see in weird documentaries, but my gut says… maybe we should _try_ , just to find out.”

The camera wavers slightly as Alex attempts to continue holding it at the right angle while he turns to face Charlie. “Can we try, Charlie?” he repeats, his voice barely more than a whisper.

Charlie reaches out and prises the camera gently out of Alex’s grasp. He flips the lens shut and sets it down on the coffee table. It’s hard to kiss and film at the same time and, right now, kissing seems a lot more important.


End file.
